Thinking and Feeling | Frankly 89
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 551 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The human brain has proven to be particularly good at breaking down all sorts of things into categories and dichotomies - even our perception of the world itself is often split between 'thinking' and 'feeling,' shaped by the sensory input we receive. It seems that our values, beliefs, opportunities – even how we define ourselves as individuals – are limited to opposing and polarized options. Yet, does this binary mindset only lead us toward more blind-spots?
In this Frankly, Nate unpacks the influence of beliefs on our feelings, and how it ultimately affects our actions. As global risks and complexity intensify and those with political power accelerate deeper divides, adopting an integrative perspective will become essential for fostering connection, cooperation, and civility. The over-reliance of the last few decades on objective facts and science is no longer enough. Now is the time to re-align our analytics with values and emotions that will light our path forward through challenges of the next few decades.
What might we achieve if we moved beyond dichotomies and embraced dualities, recognizing the importance of both sides of the same coin? Is it possible for western cultures to embrace our 'feeling' capabilities, without losing our trajectory of great contributions to science and knowledge for the world? Lastly, in what ways can we as individuals shift the way we relate to the world - to integrate thinking and feeling - so that we might remain engaged and informed citizens during these uncertain times?
(Recorded March 18th, 2025)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings. I had a lot of feedback from last, frankly, on rocks in the river. A lot of people |
| 0:09.6 | really loved it where the poem, and I was really tired and I recorded it earlier in the |
| 0:15.7 | morning. And a lot of people were like, dude, what's going on with debt and Trump and the Ukraine war and interest rates? |
| 0:26.4 | What's happened to you? |
| 0:27.6 | You're talking about soft psychology topics. |
| 0:32.7 | And we like it when you had Dennis Meadows and people talking about oil depletion and all that. |
| 0:41.8 | So I would like to discuss the overlap and the integration of thinking and feeling. |
| 0:52.2 | There are a lot of really important biophysical, macroeconomic things happening in the world. |
| 0:59.0 | And I do have a lot to say about those things that are relevant in informing possible paths forward. |
| 1:05.6 | But I want to take another stab at this dichotomy between thinking and feeling today. |
| 1:13.6 | Yesterday I went on a hike with a friend who said, what happened in the world to make you |
| 1:32.6 | less concerned about the future? |
| 1:35.6 | I said, what? |
| 1:37.6 | I am more worried about the future than I ever have been in my life. |
| 1:42.3 | I think the pathways to bending as opposed to |
| 1:46.3 | breaking have narrowed in the last three months. And my friend said, but you don't seem that |
| 1:53.2 | way. You don't talk about it. I don't feel that emanating from you. That was interesting to reflect on. |
| 2:04.7 | I also had a lot of people really liked and responded well to last weeks, frankly, |
| 2:11.1 | and there were some detractors. |
| 2:13.5 | I am blessed to have quite a large group of wise and clever women in my inner circle. |
| 2:25.3 | And one of them sent me a voicemail last week. |
| 2:30.3 | And I'd like to read it and then discuss the relevance of it. |
... |
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